Vaccination

In the 2016 election cycle, Russian Twitter trolls sent targeted pro- and anti-vaccination tweets via various fake persona types, poisoning the kind of crisis communications that may be critical today in the coronavirus pandemic.

People who rely on social media for information were more likely to be misinformed about vaccines than those who rely on traditional media, according to new research by the Annenberg Public Policy Center.

Postdoctoral fellow Matt Motta was honored with the Elsevier Atlas award for an article on overconfidence due to ignorance and anti-vaccine attitudes.

People’s willingness to use a Zika vaccine when it’s available will be influenced by how they weigh the risks associated with the disease and the vaccine, but also by their misconceptions about other vaccines, a new study has found.

In an article for the journal Politics and the Life Sciences, Kathleen Hall Jamieson looks at the role that language plays when science is conveyed to the public. Examples include the outbreak of "mad cow" disease in Britain.

How can the public’s confidence in science be strengthened? A new study finding that public confidence in science spiked following coverage of the Zika vaccine trial in 2016 suggests a way to improve trust in science on a more sustained basis.

Oxford has published The Handbook of the Science of Science Communication, the first in a series overseen by the Annenberg Public Policy Center's Science of Science Communication program.